Loadshedding Solutions

Wow Eskom’s load shedding or rolling blackouts has sure making a mess out of South Africa’s electricity grid and our economy. The insult is that they still they want to put up the tariffs. Most likely to pay themselves more bonuses. And we the public are gatvol for all the excuses, ja ja ja we heard all your lame excuses before and we are now tired.

Anyway with Tesla Powerwall threating to be sold locally, what are our solutions now.

Green energy is the only solution with off the grid as ideal but it comes at a hefty price for the average home owner. So far it looks like solar energy is in the lead in this market.

First step is getting yourself a Photovoltaic (PV) System of a few solar panels along with an inverter but this only saves you on the electricity bill every month and doesn’t help at all when loadshedding hits. The more solar panels the better I suppose.

To fix this you will need something to store the electricity for the times when load shedding occurs. Batteries are the answer and so far the leading batteries are the deep cycle batteries that is until Tesla Powerwall’s lithium-ion batteries arrive.

And don't forget this still does not get everything working as it should at home. So don't land in hot water by forgetting to include a solar geyser and a gas stove into your system as geysers along with your stove/oven use the most electricity and this would require a lot of batteries and time to keep charged.

Gas here in South Africa is a bit pricey still and I wonder when all those gas reserves found in Mozambique will start to kick into our economy. Back to the solar solution, many companies are already flooding the market with hybrid solar battery solutions and hopefully the pricing may too drop, to be affordable to the average home owner here in South Africa. Today I went to a large market chain that is represented throughout the country and saw lots of people purchasing power inverters with battery systems already integrated as shown above at reasonable prices. It will still require Eskom electricity to keep it charged unless you plug in the solar panels.